


The Price He Paid

by Akiko_Natsuko



Series: The Zine Collection [4]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Body Horror, Explosions, Gen, Guilt, Heavy Angst, Hurt No Comfort, Loss, Near Death, Realization, Secrets, Zurich
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-08
Updated: 2018-11-08
Packaged: 2019-08-20 08:15:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16552169
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Akiko_Natsuko/pseuds/Akiko_Natsuko
Summary: Maybe that was why he had been allowed to survive this mess, why he had been allowed to live, albeit in this monstrous, inhuman form. The price he had to pay, was not his life, his career, his honour…He had to live and watch his failure.





	The Price He Paid

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Reaper Zine.

     Muffled, secondary explosions were still rippling through the base when Gabriel’s consciousness came crawling back slowly, and in the back of his mind he registered the noise and knew that he should be worried about how close they were to his position. Close enough for him to feel the ground beneath rocking with each one, debris raining down on him, but it was all distant, fleeting seconds of awareness, as he currently felt as though he was swimming through molasses. It was a sensation he knew from his SEP days, from all the desperate minutes spent fighting his way back to life after the treatments had nearly killed him. It was something he had hoped never to experience again, and he groaned, immediately regretting it as the vibration sent pain reverberating through every inch of his body.

    At once he stilled, trying to focus on breathing through the pain and nothing else, only to tense as he realised that he couldn’t feel the rise and fall of his chest, or the burn of the smoke he could smell in the air around him and this time when he risked moving slightly he felt what he had missed before, the ripple of smoke and nanites that had replaced flesh and he grimaced.

    It was a sensation that he had becoming increasingly used to, the last few months having seen him spending more and more time as a being of smoke and nanites than human, despite his increasingly desperate efforts to find a way to control the process. But it had never been like this, there had always been something tethering him, reminding how it felt to be solid. To be human. Right now, such sensations felt distant, dream-like, and it was tempting to just go with it, something tugging at the edge of his consciousness that told him that he didn’t want to fight it. That he didn’t want to be human right now. Normally he would have listened to his instincts, they had kept him alive all this time after all, but there was something else tugging at his thoughts, a bone-deep fear that seemed to radiate through every one of his nanites as he realised that something was missing.

    It still took him a few minutes to convince himself to open his eyes, dreading what would happen when he did, what he would find. Afraid to see what he had become. However, eventually he coaxed them open, nausea twisting through him as he blinked and then blinked again, feeling as though he was looking through hundreds of eyes at once. He supposed that he was, catching a glimpse of himself, thick smoke writhing across the ground, dark against the varying grey shades of his surroundings, his nanites unable to process colour when he was this far gone. He shifted, watching as the smoke coiled and undulated in time with his motions, gliding over the rubble, never venturing too far but given him the disorientating feeling of being larger than himself, not helped by the dozens of eyes he could see glistening back at him from inside the smoke.

   He recoiled, wanting to flee, but there was no way he could escape from this. No way he could escape from himself, from what he had become.

He was a monster.

   It was a thought he had been fighting against for months, ever since that first morning when he woken to find his quarters flooded with smoke. Smoke that had been rising in drifting wisps from his skin. That had been the first crack. The panic sending him dashing to Angela, terror clawing at his insides, because this wasn’t supposed to happen. This wasn’t what he had signed up for. Only he had, both he and Jack had gone into SEP without any real comprehension of what the program could do to them, and it turned out that Gabriel had drawn the short straw.  His body was failing him, the enhancements corrupting themselves in a way no one had expected and Angela…Angela had been unable to help him, and unwilling to push the boundaries that might have led to something, anything that could stop this from happening.

He had understood.

Even as he had come close to hating her for it.

     It was why he had gone so far, burying himself in his work, pulling away from those he was closest to for fear that they would see the monster growing under his skin. Desperate to stop them from watching his fall, even as he pushed so deep into the grey territory of Blackwatch that he knew he could no longer call it grey, reaching out to anyone who could help this, regardless of who they were or where their allegiances lay. This wasn’t about Overwatch. It wasn’t about Blackwatch. It was about survival, about clinging to the last shreds of his humanity. It was how he had found Moira, and though her Talon, people who were willing to help him, willing to push the boundaries as far as they needed…for a price.

And Gods, the price…

    With great difficulty, he turned his gaze to his surroundings, hit by a hundred different impressions at once. A dizzying, disorientating view of the devastation around him. It was hard to understand what he was seeing, hard to comprehend that the base that had been his home for so long had been reduced to this burning, crumbling husk and harder still to think about the men and women that had fallen with it.

Gone.

Everything was gone.

Everyone.

    Yet Gabriel remained. He wasn’t sure if the noise that escaped him at that realisation was a laugh or a wail, it seemed to bubble up, swelling into his chest and reverberating through every inch of his body. It wasn’t enough. There was no noise in this world that could convey the grief and self-loathing flooding him at this moment. It had been his price to pay, his burden to carry. It was why he had kept so much from Jack and the others, why he had pushed away Genji and McCree who had only wanted to help him, hell it was why he had made sure that Moira was safely out of the way before everything could come crashing down.

He was supposed to pay the price, not them.

    Maybe that was why he had been allowed to survive this mess, why he had been allowed to live, albeit in this monstrous, inhuman form. The price he had to pay, was not his life, his career, his honour…he had sacrificed those the moment he had started down darker paths in search of an answer to his dilemma. No, the price he had to pay was to survive to see everything he had tried to protect crumble, to see everything that he had betrayed fall apart and the war he had spent a lifetime fighting sweep across the world.

He had to live and watch his failure.


End file.
